The People's Train
Documentary Feature — Kereta Rakyat Indonesia
A commuter fed up with traffic picked up a welding torch and built an open-top train in an Indonesian workshop — then actually ran it as a public service — to force a reckoning with the city's traffic crisis.
Bogor, Indonesia. 1.3 million people. 40 minutes from Jakarta. Home to a mysterious 15th-century stone marking a Lost Kingdom, a 150-year-old colonial railway, and one of the worst traffic bottlenecks in the world.
A road closure caused by a literal landslide of corruption has severed one of only two arterial routes into the city. Meanwhile, pristine rail tracks glint under the hot tropical sun — slicing through the heart of Bogor’s traffic problem, silent and virtually unused.
The tracks are already there. This is a story about how a community started seeing them.
The Film
Kereta Rakyat Indonesia — The People’s Train is a medium-length documentary feature following one person’s attempt to build a custom open-top railcar in a Bogor workshop — from the first weld to the first paying passenger — and run it on state rail infrastructure as an act of civic provocation.
This is a film about what happens when one person stops waiting and starts building. Intimate in scale, Indonesian in character, and designed to travel.
Why Now?
The road closure changed the calculation. What was a chronic problem became an acute one overnight — and suddenly the tracks cutting right through the gridlock aren’t a curiosity, they’re an argument. The city is in crisis, the government has an MoU on record with state rail manufacturer PT INKA, and the newly renovated rail tracks sit idle.
This project exists at the exact moment the city is ready to hear it.
What We’re Making
The immediate deliverable is a medium-length documentary feature (approximately 45 minutes) following the making of Kereta Rakyat Indonesia — from the first weld in a Bogor workshop to the first paying passenger, and whatever the state does next.
The feature will generate footage, audience data, and relationships that naturally extend into further content: a documentary series tracking the ongoing story, and beyond that — a rail-based channel that uses Indonesia’s 6,000 km of track as a vehicle for history and travel storytelling.
This funding unlocks the feature. The feature unlocks everything else.